This is the amazing backstory of David Paulides, who wrote the books on Missing 411, in which he exposes a cover-up by the largest body of federally-trained police officers in the United States, the forest rangers of the U.S. National Park Service. They are covering up abnormally high numbers of disappearances in our national parks. Thousands of people go missing every year, under circumstances that defy logic.

David Paulides is a retired, twenty-year veteran of the San Jose Police Department, who worked his way up to the rank of detective. He always had an interest in the outdoors, mostly fishing in the Sierras, and in Oregon. Shortly after his retirement from the police force, he was in a national park doing research for a book on cryptozoology. He suspected he was being followed by two rangers in uniform.

At the end of the day, David departed the grounds by car, driving to his motel room only a short distance away. Soon there was a knock on his door. It was one of the rangers who had been following him. The ranger explained they recognized him from a picture on the jacket of one of his books. They had read his published work, and they knew he was an ex-cop.

Paulides invited him in, and the officer revealed, that he and his partner were working on park grounds to investigate missing person cases. People were going missing in places which should have been safe. Typically in the first week that followed such a disappearance, there was a lot of attention from the press, and resources were heavily committed in a search for the victim. However these efforts would quickly end in failure, and the visibility of the case would drop to zero. In ranger jargon, they called it, a search which has been placed in “continuous, limited mode”… or in other words, a cold case.

These disappearances happened under circumstances so abnormal, that the cases cried out for further investigation, especially in light of the increasing number of missing people. When the ranger and his partner reported this, they were stonewalled by chain of command.

Paulides’ contacts in law enforcement confirmed the rangers’ story, and further research would prove this was not just a problem in one of the national parks, but in all of them. He ruled out those cases of missing people who wanted to harm themselves, or people who were the victims of foul play, or a predatory animal. He looked into situations where bloodhounds were unable to pick up a scent, where expert trackers could not find any sign of a trail. Such as the case of the two year old girl, who was found alive twelve miles away from where she had gone missing the previous day, a trek which would have taken her over two mountain ranges, in less than twenty-four hours. Because of her tender age, she was unable to provide any details of her ordeal.

In his book “Missing 411 – North America and Beyond”, David Paulides features the case of Kevin O’Keefe, a camper thirty-six years of age. In 1985, O’Keefe traveled from his home in California, for a wilderness vacation in Alaska. Arriving at Glacier Bay National Park, he first took a class on how to thrive in the Alaskan wilderness. A seaplane dropped him off alone, near Wolf Point, where he set up camp on September 22nd.

Two weeks later, a National Park ranger was patrolling by boat at Wolf Point. He wanted to check in with O’Keefe, who was due to be picked up in a few days. The ranger found Kevin’s campsite in disarray, and apparently abandoned. More rangers were called in, and with the help of search dogs, one half mile from Kevin’s camp, they found his hat and his boots.

The campsite still had everything O’Keefe would have needed to survive, including food and fresh water. To David Paulides it appeared obvious that the camper might have been found inland of the point where the boots were located. But the park rangers did not search further inland. Paulides would like to know why.